If the war had come to an end in 1917, if the conflict
had been decisively won by either the Allies or
the central powers eighteen months earlier, then
for certain the history of the world would have
been very different. Instead the war went on.
Neither a compromise peace nor a decision on the
western front could be attained. European society
had withstood the strains of war for more than
two and a half years much better than anyone
thought likely in the beginning. In the third year,
the toll of destruction finally began to crack the
political and social cohesion of Russia, the largest
of the European powers; nor could even the militarily
stronger Western countries escape the consequences
of the conflict. The year 1917 marked a
great change in the direction of world history.
From the start the war had not been entirely
European. With the entry of Turkey into the war
in 1914 the destiny of the Middle East was bound
up in the war’s outcome. In what, from the point
of view of the war itself, was a sideshow, the
British launched offensives in 1916, 1917 and
1918 against the Turks and at the end of the war
became the predominant military power in this
region of the world. They were now bound to
agreements and promises to the French (the
Sykes–Picot agreement) to divide influence with
them after the war; to the Arabs they had held
out prospects of independence; and to the
Zionists, who under Chaim Weizmann’s leadership
were working for a Jewish state, ‘a National
Home of the Jewish People’ in Palestine. From
these origins in the First World War developed
the Middle East conflicts that have continued
down to the present day.
From the start, too, eastern Asia was involved
in the war. On the pretext of pursuing the war
against Germany, Japan began by occupying the
German colonial sphere in China in 1914, and
went on to attempt to gain predominance over a
much greater part of China while the European
powers were locked in devastating conflict thousands
of miles away. On the continent of Africa
the war seemed only to result in a rearrangement
of colonies: a further chapter in the history of
imperialism. Yet the new ‘mandates’ of the League
of Nations over former German colonies held out
eventual promise of independence for the African
people. Peace treaties did not end these worldwide
repercussions of the war. National aspirations
which were intensified during the war continued
to ferment when the war was over.
Nineteen-seventeen was a momentous year in
world history. Two events almost coincided: the
Russian Revolution and the entry of the US into
the war. By becoming a belligerent and assuming
world commitments, the US was in decisive
breach of the advice of the Founding Fathers of
the republic. After the war, the American people
tried to treat this as an aberration and return to
normalcy and ‘isolation’. But Americans could
not escape involvement in global affairs in the
twentieth century as they perceived their security
and prosperity threatened by events elsewhere in
the world.
Because of the realities of American politics,
the decision for war rested on the shoulders of
one man, President Wilson. Wilson’s secretary of
state, Robert Lansing, was a convinced interventionist
on the Allied side long before Wilson
reached the same conclusion. He saw the war in
Europe as a fight for democracy against the
warlike Prussian Junker spirit; Lansing’s views did
not much affect the president one way or the
other. He listened more to his friend and personal
emissary, Colonel Edward M. House. But Wilson
was very much his own man, supremely confident
of his good judgement at a time when in questions
of foreign policy, of peace and of war, the
presidency was virtually supreme. There can be no
doubt that his personal sympathies lay with the
democracies. The overthrow of the tsar in March
1917 therefore removed one obstacle to the
US siding with the Allies. Nor can there be any
doubt that from the start of the war in Europe
the actual interpretation of American neutrality
enormously favoured the Allied cause in providing
financial credit and war supplies, even though
Germany managed to secure some American
imports through the neutral Scandinavian ports
and Holland. Still, US policy was not evenhanded
and did not exemplify Wilson’s own call
to the American people to ‘act and speak in
the true spirit of neutrality’. In November 1916,
Wilson narrowly won a second term as president,
using such slogans as ‘He kept us out of war’.
Was Wilson cynically playing politics when during
the campaign he declared, ‘I am not expecting
this country to get into war’, although five
months later he led the US into just that?
Wilson’s change of stance in April 1917, his
public enthusiasm for the rightness and justice of
the noble cause of war, was not what he felt; he
hated war, and his efforts to keep the US out of
the war before February 1917 were genuine. To
claim that the US did not behave as a proper
neutral from 1914 to 1917, that Wilson hoped
to frustrate a German victory by assisting the
Allies, that he legalistically stretched the concept
of America’s neutral rights, condoning British
infractions and harshly condemning German violations
of these rights, does not prove that Wilson
desired or expected the US to enter the war and
was willing to sacrifice American lives for the
Allied cause. Wilson knew there was a risk of war.
From the outset the Germans had been left in no
doubt, and were indeed themselves in no doubt,
that to resume unrestricted submarine warfare
against American ships supplying the Allies would
lead to war with the US. Expecting to win the
war before America could carry military weight in
Europe, the kaiser, urged by the German military,
nevertheless on 9 January 1917 finally chose
to use this weapon.
Wilson had wished to save America’s strength
so as to ensure a just and permanent peace after
war was over. The war, he believed, would leave
the world exhausted, ready to listen to his words
of reason. To gain his end, he had attempted as
a first step to lead the warring nations to a compromise
peace through his personal mediation.
But war was, nevertheless, eventually forced on
him by the German military leaders.
On 22 January 1917, after the failure of his
last effort to mediate, Wilson still proclaimed a
vision of a ‘peace without victory’ and a new
world order or League of Nations to ensure that
peace would prevail. Nine days later the Germans
publicly announced their intention to attack all
neutral shipping. Wilson could not ignore the
challenge, but his reaction stopped short of war.
The next blow to his attempt to keep out of war
was the revelation of the so-called Zimmermann
telegram, a message from the German foreign
minister to the Mexicans encouraging them to go
to war with the US and to recover their lost territories
in alliance with Germany. The telegram
had been intercepted by British intelligence and
published on 1 March. Anger and indignation
swept America. A few days later American cargo
ships were sunk without warning by German submarines.
Still Wilson hesitated. In the confidential
documents and private papers of this time
there is no hint of enthusiasm for war on Wilson’s
part, though his Cabinet were now unanimously
in favour. But on 2 April 1917 Wilson submitted
to Congress a request to recognise that Germany
had made war on the US, which both Houses of
Congress approved on 6 April 1917.
Even so, President Wilson still maintained a
separate status on behalf of the US. He did not
simply join the alliance; the US became an ‘associated
power’, Wilson thereby retaining a free diplomatic
hand. He would pursue his goal of arriving
at a just peace by other means. The American
people were not making war on the German
people but on their militarily crazed rulers.
Wilson’s faith in American democracy made him
believe rather naively that he could appeal to the
peoples to follow his ideals if the governments of
the Allies or former enemies should place obstacles
in the way of the just peace he envisioned.
The US was not ready for war in April 1917.
Its military preparations, especially its great naval
expansion, as well as its war plans, had been
designed to secure American safety against the
eventual victors of the First World War, whether
led by Britain or Germany. Some military men
believed the Germans could land more than a
million men in the US should they decide to
invade it; the navy estimate was a more sober
200,000. The US navy thus built a great battleship
fleet ‘second to none’ – that is, equal in size
to the British – to protect the US from invasion
after the First World War had ended. America’s
military preparations were particularly ill-suited
for the war it now joined. The Allies did not need
any more battleships, but they were desperately
short of troops on the western front. Wilson had
forbidden war plans of intervention in the First
World War before April 1917; now everything
had to be improvised.
The impact of American military intervention
in Europe was not felt for a year. Not until May
1918 were American forces, under General John
Pershing’s command, strong enough to affect the
fighting on the western front. It was just such a
breathing space the German high command had
counted on to force Britain and France to their
knees.
Along the battlefields of France the year 1917
again brought no result but continued to grind
up hundreds of thousands of men and their
weapons. General Robert Georges Nivelle, who
had replaced Joffre in all but name as French
commander-in-chief, planned a great spring
offensive to be coordinated with Russian and
Italian offensives. The British army had now
grown to 1,200,000 men and the French to
2,000,000; together with the Belgians the Allies
now enjoyed a superiority of 3,900,000 over
2,500,000 Germans. The Germans stood on the
defensive in the west but frustrated the French
and British efforts in the spring and summer of
1917 to break through their lines and rout their
armies. Nivelle’s failure resulted in widespread
demoralisation among the French troops. The
French nation, which had withstood so much in
two and a half years of war, appeared, during the
spring of 1917, to lose its cohesion and unity of
purpose. Soldiers mutinied, bitter at the spectacle
of Paris, with its cafés and boulevards and smart
ladies untroubled by war. Bitterness and despair,
fear of mutilation and death, reopened old
wounds of social schism.
The collapse of French morale was localised
and General Henri Philippe Pétain’s skilful handling
of the situation, and the belief he instilled
that the war would in future be fought with more
consideration for the value of human life, brought
the mutinies under control. Of the 30,000 to
40,000 mutineers forty-nine were shot to serve as
an example. In the summer of 1917 the ‘sacred
union’, the French political truce, ended. Following
the lead of Russian Bolsheviks, French socialists
now spoke of compromise peace. At this
critical juncture President Raymond Poincaré
chose as head of government, hated though he
was by the socialists, the 76-year-old veteran
politician Georges Clemenceau, who embodied
the spirit of fighting the war to victory. The
country responded once more.
For the British and Canadians who bore the
brunt of the fighting during the summer and
autumn of 1917 it was a bitter year, and their
commander Field Marshal Lord Haig was criticised
for the unprecedented losses sustained in
the offensives in Flanders. In November he
reached the deserted village of Passchendaele less
than ten miles from his starting point. Passchendaele
came to symbolise the apparently
pointless slaughter. Romance in war had long
ago vanished in the sodden, rat-infested trenches,
death was a daily expectation.
By the autumn of 1917 three of the now six
great powers at war were on the point of military
and economic collapse. The Austrian half of the
Dual Monarchy was desperately short of food; the
Habsburg army could not without German help
sustain the war on all fronts. The new emperor,
Charles I, was secretly seeking a way out of the
war. On the other side, the Italians were also soon
in desperate plight. Suffering 340,000 casualties,
the Italian army was defeated at the battle of
Caporetto in October 1917, but with some
British and French help recovered to man a new
line of defence.
One of the great powers, Russia, did collapse.
The revolution that overthrew the tsar in March
1917 had not taken it out of the war immediately.
The new provisional government intended to
fight it more energetically and successfully than
before. But Alexander Kerensky, war minister of
the government and later its leader, could not
with fine speeches make up for Russia’s exhaustion
and the mismanagement of the ‘home
front’. The Russian summer offensive which he
ordered turned into a rout. In November 1917
the Bolsheviks seized power and called for peace
immediately ‘without annexations and without
indemnities’. Russia was out of the war, a stunning
blow for the Allies.
Nineteen-seventeen was a disastrous year for
the Allies. Only on the oceans did they win what
for Britain and France was a battle for survival.
The Germans only once seriously challenged the
battleship might of the British navy. The resulting
battle of Jutland in May 1916 was claimed by
both sides as a victory, but the German fleet did
not again challenge the British navy whereas
Britain continued to rule above the waves and
maintain its blockade of Germany. The real
danger to the Allies was the ‘blockade’ imposed
below the water’s surface by German submarines.
At first it looked as though the Germans would
sink enough ships to knock Britain and France
out of the war by cutting the Atlantic supply line,
for they sank 212 ships in February 1917 and a
record 335 ships, totalling 847,000 tons, in April.
By convoying, ships losses were reduced to 107
ships by December. This was the damage that
some 100 German submarines inflicted. What
would have happened if the Germans had concentrated
on this effective offensive weapon
before the war instead of wasting resources on the
prestigious German battleship fleet? They were to
repeat the error in the Second World War.
During the grim winter of 1917 and 1918,
widespread disaffection and doubts whether
the war could ever be won, led to new calls
for peace from all sides. Lenin had nothing to lose
by calling the labouring masses in Europe to
revolution and to bring to an end the capitalist
imperialist war of their masters. Lloyd George,
determined to fight until the German rulers were
defeated, responded, to still the doubts in Britain,
by delivering a speech in January 1918 to the
British Trades Union Congress. Its keynote was
moderation and an insistence that the central
powers give up all their conquests so that the
sanctity of treaties be upheld. Lloyd George’s
speech was overshadowed a few days later, on 8
January 1918, by President Wilson’s famous
Fourteen Points setting out in a similar way the
basis of peace. The worldwide appeal of the
Fourteen Points lay in their lofty design for a new
era of international relations. The world led by
the US and Wilson’s ‘new diplomacy’ would ‘be
made fit and safe to live in’; every nation would
‘determine its own institutions, be assured of
justice and fair dealing by the other peoples of
the world as against force and selfish aggression’.
But the specific Russian, British and American
peace proclamations, with their insistence on
the restoration of conquered territory, all presupposed
the defeat of Germany. No German
could regard as a ‘compromise’ giving up all the
territory still firmly occupied.
In 1918 it appeared likely that the Allies would
be defeated rather than Germany. The generals
Hindenburg and Ludendorff had established a
virtual dictatorship in Germany and marshalled all
resources in a country exhausted by war. In
March 1918 Ludendorff mounted a powerful
offensive in the west; during April, May and June
German troops broke through and once more
came close to Paris. The cost in casualties was
again huge: 800,000 Germans and more than a
million Allied troops. This turned out to be imper-
ial Germany’s last bid for victory, though the
Allies, commanded now by Marshal Ferdinand
Foch, did not know it.
The Allied counter-offensives found a weakened
enemy losing the will to fight. The greatest
defeatism was not, however, to be found on the
battlefront but among the so recently revered
German generals, Hindenburg and Ludendorff.
Germany’s allies were collapsing in September
1918. The Turkish army was defeated in Palestine.
The Bulgarians could not resist an Allied advance
from Greece and requested an armistice. Though
Austrian troops were still stoutly defending the
Italian front, the Dual Monarchy was disintegrating
and its various nationalities were proclaiming
their independence. In France, the arrival of new
masses of fresh American troops had not only
blunted Germany’s earlier thrust against Paris, but
filled the German high command with a sense of
hopelessness. Successful Allied offensives broke
their last will to resist.
Ludendorff, towards the close of September
1918, demanded that the government in Berlin
should secure an immediate armistice to save the
army. In Berlin the politicians tried to win a little
time. Later, Ludendorff propagated the lie, so
useful to the Nazis, that the army had been
‘stabbed in the back’. The truth is that Ludendorff
wished to end a war that was militarily lost while
the army still preserved its discipline and cohesion.
He got his way. On 11 November 1918 the last
shot was fired in France.
World History
